this week in art

STURTEVANT: DOUBLE TROUBLE

Museum of Modern Art
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
The Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Painting and Sculpture Gallery, Gallery 5, fifth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Daily through February 22, $25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Walking into MoMA’s “Sturtevant: Double Trouble” exhibit, you’re likely to be overcome with a feeling of déjà vu, or perhaps wonder whether you’ve actually sauntered into one of the museum’s painting and sculpture galleries featuring works by a multitude of artists. Ohio-born artist Elaine Sturtevant spent her long career — she died in May 2014, while participating in this first major American survey of her oeuvre — taking the work of others and making it her own, leaving some critics to cheer her bold individuality and others to decry her as little more than a plagiarist. “Same is a copy but it’s not the same,” she said, fiercely defending her method, which delves into wide-ranging questions of authorship, gender, and originality. “Her longstanding concern with the political, economic, and cultural circumstances that underpin art’s creation and consumption is an essential part of her work,” MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry writes in the foreword to the exhibition catalog. “‘Sturtevant: Double Trouble’ draws attention to that aspect of her bold and groundbreaking practice, suggesting that she opens the art history of her time — and ours — in new directions, challenging us to rethink many of our assumptions about what we see, how we value what we see, and the histories that our institutions perpetuate.” Sturtevant didn’t just “repeat” random works of others; instead, she asks viewers to reconsider iconic images by major artists, usually done without the express permission of those artists, aside from Andy Warhol, who let her do whatever she wanted with his films and silkscreens. In “Warhol Flowers,” she has taken an image, generally associated with femininity, by a sexually ambiguous Pop artist, and forced the viewer to reconsider it in multiple ways. In “Johns 0 through 9,” she stencils the numbers zero through nine in the style of Jasper Johns, in encaustic on a ripped piece of newspaper from the business section, adding her own element of the financial nature of art. In “Study for Muybridge, Plate #97: Woman Walking,” Sturtevant has photographed herself, naked, walking in front of re-created paintings by James Rosenquist, Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein. (Interestingly, this past November, Sturtevant’s painting “Lichtenstein, Frighten Girl” sold at Christie’s for more than $3.4 million, up from $710,500 in 2011; multiples of the Lichtenstein lithograph on which it is based, “Crying Girl,” have reached as high as $78,400.)

In “Duchamp Man Ray Portrait,” Sturtevant depicts her face, neck, and head covered in shaving cream, a decidedly male activity, echoing Man Ray’s 1924 gelatin silver print “Duchamp with Shaving Lather for Monte Carlo Bond.” In the collage “Working Drawing Wesselmann Great American Nude Lichtenstein Hot Dog,” Sturtevant juxtaposes works by two seminal artists, making a deliciously wry and decadent statement about women as sex objects. She also copies, er, appropriates, um, pays homage to, uh, skewers, well, echoes, eh, repeats, oh, reconfigures works by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Frank Stella, and Robert Gober. There are also several video installations from 2010 and 2012, further repurposing pop-culture imagery in the digital age, including re-creating the decidedly analog “Pac-Man” game as if she herself is eating up and spitting out art history. In the September-October 2005 issue of Index magazine, she told Peter Halley, in reference to criticism of her 1973 show “Studies for Warhols’ Marilyns Beuys’ Actions and Objects Duchamps’ Etc. Including Film,” at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, “The reviews for that show were the same as always — that I was reviewing history, or that the pieces were all copies, blah blah blah. I realized that if I continued to work and get that kind of critique, then the work would get diluted. So I decided to wait until the mental retards caught up. And, indeed they did.” It’s a shame Sturtevant didn’t live long enough to see what everyone had to say about MoMA’s stellar survey, which continues through February 22. (On February 21 at 11:30, there will be a special Gallery Session, “20 Questions in the Wormhole,” which examines the intentions of this fascinating, exciting, and controversial “copycat artist.”)

THOMAS STRUTH PHOTOGRAPHS

Thomas Struth, “Tien An Men, Beijing,” Chromogenic print, 1997 (Gift of Graciela and Neal Meltzer, 2002)

Who: Thomas Struth
What: “Thomas Struth: Photographs”
Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St., Gallery 851, 212-535-7710
When: Daily through February 16, recommended admission $12-$25
Why: German photographer Thomas Struth, who lives and works in Berlin and New York, gets a kind of mini-greatest-hits show at the Met, consisting of works from throughout his nearly forty-year career, primarily from the museum’s collection. The exhibition ranges from Struth’s small black-and-white photos of empty streets in New York City in 1978 to his large-scale color photograph of the Pantheon in Rome as a group of people gather inside in 1990 to a never-before-shown 2013 picture of a woman in the midst of major surgery, her body barely visible amid wires, tubes, and other medical equipment. Struth, who specializes in taking photographs of people looking at art and architecture, goes to the next level in “Tien An Men, Beijing,” in which he captures a man taking a picture of a woman standing in front of a lion that is looking down at her while a portrait of Mao hangs in the distance, the former Chinese leader surveying it all. Other highlights by Struth, who trained under Gerhard Richter and Bernd and Hilla Becher, include “Hot Rolling Mill, ThyssenKrupp Steel, Duisburg,” depicting a steel processing plant; “Paradise 13, Yakushima, Japan,” a shot of a moss-covered section of a forest; and “Milan Cathedral (Facade), Milan,” a daunting shot of the Italian cathedral dominating the little people walking along the front steps.

FUNLAND: PLEASURES & PERILS OF THE EROTIC FAIRGROUND

”Jump for Joy” is one of the highlights of immersive “Funland” exhibit at the Museum of Sex (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Ave. at 27th St.
Daily through spring 2015, $17.50
Portal of Love: Sunday, February 15, $25-$30, 10:00 pm – 4:00 am
212-689-6337
www.museum.museumofsex.com

When it comes right down to it, sex, in all its iterations, if done right, should be fun, if a little dangerous. And that’s the premise behind the Museum of Sex’s playful interactive exhibition “Funland: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Fairground.” Bompass & Parr, the jelly-loving London-based conceptual art duo of Sam Bompass and Harry Parr that has celebrated death in the architectural design competition Monumental Masonry, created a multisensory church organ promoting the wonders of whisky with the Flavour Conductor, and built the cake-inspired nine-hole Crazy Golf course on Selfridge’s roof, has now transformed a section of the Museum of Sex into a kinky carnival where visitors get to shed a bit of their inhibition and have a rousingly bawdy good time — while getting to release orgasmic endorphins in public. “Funland” comprises a handful of amorous attractions that add tantalizing twists to fairground favorites, all set in a luridly lit amorously red setting, with a carny, carnal soundscape by Dom James. Begin with “Foreplay Derby,” in which challengers roll balls into a hole in order to make their assigned gold phallus cross a finish line first; the winner just might get whipped by a seductively clad museum worker. “The Tunnel of Love” is a hall of mirrors that leads to a sculpture of a G-spot that is also a Theremin that plays music when you wave your hand over it.

“Grope Mountain” is a three-sided climbing wall where you have to grab on to casts of sexual body parts and orifices in order to successfully make it across. And in “Jump for Joy,” visitors remove their jackets and shoes and spend several minutes bouncing around a room of giant inflated breasts, like kids playing in a balloon room; be prepared to exit somewhat dizzy and winded. The exhibit also includes a vitrine that offers daringly shaped edible delights and the “Erotic Picture Palace,” which shows NSFW old movies and carnival footage, including The Rotascope. Professor Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield puts it all in cultural context in her essay “As Graceful as They Were Disgraceful: Eroticism and the Fairground,” in which she writes, “Despite the attempts by moral puritans to tame the baying crowds, the elements of untamed sexuality, the Baktinian world of the carnivalesque remained beneath the veneer of the modernistic fairground roundabouts and carousels. . . . However, it was entry into the sideshows that revealed to the visitor the full frontal erotic reality of the female nude. . . . The sideshows of the twentieth century were a continuous link to the bacchanalia of the medieval and preindustrial European fairs, offering sex, nudity, and the wonders of gay Paree for a penny or a dime.” The Museum of Sex offers its own whimsical twenty-first-century take on bacchanalia for $17.50 plus tax.

The museum also has a large yet intimate new café/den/bar appropriately called Play, where you can grab a drink or dinner while perusing a book from its extensive sexually charged library. For Valentine’s Day weekend, MoSex is hosting “Get Steamy” specials, with “The Full Treatment: 3 Aphrodisiac Shooters,” a trio of vodka-infused cocktails (Lychee Libidinal, Pomegranate Virility, and Citrous Oxide); bath and body packages; and extended hours, remaining open till midnight on Friday and Saturday. And on Sunday night from 8:00 till 4:00, “Portal of Love” will feature modern burlesque and genre-bending performances by ill-Esha, BRANX, Brightside, Of the Trees, PartyFoul 5000, Soohan, the Bill Wurtzel Trio, House of Screwball, Groucho Fractal, Magic Mike, Cat Wolf, Wild Torus, Kevin Karpt, Evelyn Von Gizycki, Lindsee Lonesome, and the Merry Pranksters, live painting by Joness Jones and Harrison Lance Crawford, and workshops led by Val Tignini (“Kundalini Rising”), David Young (“Guided Dual Flute Meditation”), Richard Anton Diaz (“Activating Sexual Energy”), and Jane Bernard (“Intuitive Thinking”). You can also check out the other exhibitions at the museum: “The Eve of Porn: Linda Lovelace” examines the controversy surrounding Deep Throat and the treatment of its star, while “The Sex Lives of Animals” is an engaging and educational exploration of animal sexual behavior.

THE MYTH MAKERS: AVIAN AVATARS

The Tourist, a Victoria crowned pigeon, hovers not far from Macy’s (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Garment District Plazas
Broadway between 41st & 36th Sts.
Through April 30 (all events free with advance RSVP)
“Chocolate and Roses” tour February 14 at 3:00
www.garmentdistrictnyc.com
www.themythmakers.blogspot.com
avian avatars slideshow

This rather cold and bleak winter hasn’t stopped a group of very large, determined birds from migrating to the Garment District and nesting right smack on Broadway. Married couple and artistic collaborators Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein have placed five monumental sculptures between Thirty-Sixth and Forty-First Streets, giant birds constructed from found materials both natural (maple saplings) and machine-made (various repurposed plastic objects). Since 2010, Dodson and Moerlein, as the Myth Makers, have been installing public projects inspired by nature and wildlife throughout the Northeast and other locations. They work primarily with new-growth saplings, culling them from forestry sites and then steaming and bending the wood, weaving them into beautiful arcs and outlines. For “Avian Avatars,” the first winter installation sponsored by the Garment District Alliance, the Myth Makers have incorporated a New York City sensibility into the works, which stand between eighteen and twenty-six feet high, each one accompanied by an inspirational quote by a famous figure. At the north end is the Scold, a crow whose feathers are made of yellow “caution” and “cuidado” tape, sending out a warning to all comers in two languages. According to Dodson and Moerlein’s mythology, the crow is “a raucous chatterbox [that] has an opinion on everything.” Feel free to step inside for a different kind of view while considering this pearl from Henry David Thoreau: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life….” One block south is an owl known as the Great Spirit, whose fur is made of white and brown plastic bags snapping in the breeze. Described as “a humble leader [that] embraces the strengths and weaknesses of humanity,” the Great Spirit gazes intensely over the city as it shares this thought from Mother Teresa: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can [each] do small things with great love.”

“Avian Avatars” are nesting along Broadway through April (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Next up is the falcon called the Taste Maker, boasting a dark black head (made from burned saplings) and a body covered in thin plastic tubing. The Myth Makers consider the falcon to be “an uncompromising harbinger of taste,” explaining that “the critic is not a populist,” and they relate the bird to something Ayn Rand once said: “The truth is not for all . . . but only for those who seek it.” The Realist is that favorite New York City flying icon, the red-tailed hawk, in this case showing off a glorious plumage composed of red plastic barricade fencing that is so familiar on construction sites. “Everyone has a killer instinct, a desire to fly, and an ambition to achieve their fifteen minutes of fame,” the Myth Makers proclaim, while Bruce Springsteen adds some words to live by: “When it comes to luck, you make your own.” The final bird is a proud Victoria crowned pigeon called the Tourist, its feathers formed by golf clubs with colorful handles, while purple plastic pieces sit atop its head, affirming its royalty. Its legend states, “Visitors drawn to this vibrant city shape culture with their impulsive consumer behavior,” while Malcolm Gladwell adds, “Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.”

Towering bird sculptures are made with bent sapling branches and repurposed plastic (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As with all of the Myth Makers’ work, “Avian Avatars” is temporary, although it will not go up in flames as so many of their other projects are designed to do. The five birds will continue roosting on Broadway through April, as the snow melts away and spring is on the horizon. Several of the pieces can be entered, so feel free to walk inside; don’t be surprised if you’re sharing space with real birds, as sparrows twitter and flit through the wooden shapes. A thoroughly congenial pair, Dodson and Morelein will be hosting a series of special events, all free with advance RSVP, in conjunction with the installation, which brings a playful life to the area. On February 14 at 3:00, they will be presenting a romantic Valentine’s Day “Chocolate and Roses” tour; be sure to ask them about how they met. After the tour, they will head over to Harlow at 109 East Fifty-Sixth St. to inaugurate their “Love Birds” indoor installation, complete with a reception and cocktail party. On March 7, they will give a tour for Armory Arts Week. On March 25, they will team up for a behind-the-scenes conversation at 3:00 and will then discuss public art projects at the Artists Talk on Art panel at the Jefferson Market Library at 6:00, followed by a Q&A. And on April 24, they will give their last tour as part of International Sculpture Day, shortly before “Avian Avatars” flies away for good.

WANG JIANWEI: SPIRAL RAMP LIBRARY

Who: Wang Jianwei
What: “Spiral Ramp Library,” live performance held in conjunction with the closing of the exhibition “Wang Jianwei: Time Temple”
Where: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St., 212-423-3587
When: Thursday, February 12, $12, 8:00, and Friday, February 13, $15, 8:00
Why: “I always want to position my works, the exhibitions, and the audience’s relationship to the exhibitions as part of a process. The process includes changes that take place during different periods of time. For example, the production of works as time, the exhibition cycle as time, and the audience’s viewing experience in different locations as time,” Beijing-based artist Wang Jianwei says in a video about his Guggenheim exhibition, “Time Temple.” The exhibition consists of a room of painting and sculpture on view through February 16; the fifty-five-minute film The Morning Time Disappeared, inspired by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, screening daily at 1:00; and the live multimedia performance event “Spiral Ramp Library,” taking place February 12-13 in the museum’s rotunda, incorporating sound, video, dance, theater, and improvisation, gathering ideas generated by the exhibition’s opening event, in which twenty speakers discussed ten topics, including maps, Jorge Luis Borges, climate, Frank Lloyd Wright, the universe, and the Guggenheim itself, in a way reimagining the building as Borges’s Tower of Babel in which every person is a book. (The February 13 performance will be followed by a Q&A with Wang.)

JOHN WATERS: BEVERLY HILLS JOHN

John Waters, “Beverly Hills John,” C-print, 2012 (courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery)

Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 14, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-680-9889
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

King of Filth John Waters gives Hollywood celebrity culture, and himself, an extremely funny and clever facelift in his latest exhibit at Marianne Boesky in Chelsea. “Beverly Hills John” consists of photography, collage, sculpture, installation, and a new full-length film, his first as writer and director since 2004’s A Dirty Shame. (In the meantime, the Baltimore native has been performing his one-man show, This Filthy World, and writing such books as Role Models and Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America.) “Separate But Equal” is a black-and-white C-print of a black man drinking from a water fountain labeled “Gay Single,” which is connected to a sink labeled “Gay Married.” In “Library Science,” Waters offers adult takes on classic literature covers, turning, for example, Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang into Dion Dermot’s Clitty Clitty Bang Bang and Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre into Channy Wadd’s God’s Little Faker. Waters pays homage to innovative multimedia artist Mike Kelley, who committed suicide in 2012, with “R.I.P. Mike Kelley,” a miniature sculpture of a cozy living room with a fireplace, comfy chair, and cat urn. The Death character from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal hovers over a deplaning John F. Kennedy and Jackie O in “Grim Reaper.” In “Brainiac,” Waters reconstructs a tabloid magazine cover with such headlines as “Joan Didion Hits 250 Pounds!” and “Nude Photos of W. H. Auden Found!” Waters alternates pictures of a flustered Curly from the Three Stooges with shots of rectal exams in “Probe.” (In an odd coincidence, a man named John Waters served as assistant director on the 1933 film Broadway to Hollywood, in which Moe and Curly make cameos as clowns.) “Stolen Jean Genet” is a re-creation of the headstone of French writer and activist Jean Genet, which was actually stolen and is still missing. And in “Mom and Dad,” Waters repurposes stills from William Beaudine’s 1945 film Mom and Dad, which features a notorious sexual hygiene movie used as a terrifying teaching tool.

John Waters’s latest exhibit is highlighted by new film showing children reading script of cleaned-up version of PINK FLAMINGOS retitled KIDDIE FLAMINGOS

The centerpiece of the show is the seventy-four-minute Kiddie Flamingos, in which Waters films children doing a table reading of a somewhat, er, watered-down version of the script of Waters’s breakthrough 1972 trailer-park cult black comedy, Pink Flamingos, about Babs Johnson (Divine), her son, Crackers (Danny Mills), her mother, Edie (Edith Massey), their friend Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), and their battle with the mean and nasty Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole). The children, in various stages of garish makeup, including one boy with a pencil-thin mustache playing the narrator (Waters), don’t always understand what they’re saying, but it’s a riot to watch them tell this hysterical tale of oddballs who have rather extreme eccentricities. Waters, of course, is not above making fun of himself and his own eccentricities as well. The title piece is a creepy self-portrait that depicts him as a victim of plastic surgery gone terribly wrong, in between photos of fellow knife casualties Justin Bieber and Lassie. Sitting empty in the gallery is “Bill’s Stroller,” emblazoned with the names of strip clubs and boasting a spiked leather harness meant for Waters’s fake baby, Bill. (He really does have an angry doll-child he calls Bill who he keeps at home.) And in “Self Portrait #5,” Waters casts himself as a dogcatcher, smiling devilishly at the viewer and holding a carrier with a cute little puppy inside. It’s a wonderfully sly image, emblematic of all of us who treasure Waters’s ongoing counterculture shenanigans, willing to be carried by him wherever he may go as he continues to fight the establishment in his unique, wickedly subversive ways.

TONY CRAGG: WALKS OF LIFE

Tony Cragg’s undulating “Points of View” is part of Madison Square Park installation “Walks of Life” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Tony Cragg
What: “Walks of Life”
Where: Madison Square Park, between Madison Ave. & Broadway and 23rd & 26th Sts., 212-520-7600
When: Daily through February 8
Why: For nearly twenty years, Turner Prize-winning artist Tony Cragg’s “Resonating Bodies” have flanked the entrance to Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, a lively pair of large-scale musical instruments. Now the Liverpool-born artist, who lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany, has placed a trio of bronze sculptures, collectively titled “Walks of Life,” on the Madison Square Park lawns, twisting shapes that seem to shake with the location’s high energy. In the southwest corner, visitors are encouraged to walk inside “Caldera,” which stands on three tiptoes, and look up at the sky. On the central Oval Lawn, three eighteen-foot-high works form “Points of View,” rising up with dynamic, humanistic undulating forms; from various angles you can make out abstract facial profiles. And in the northwest corner, the green, dynamic “Mixed Feelings” teeters like a warped Statue of Liberty